Katharina Dalton

12:01AM BST 29 Sep 2004

Katharina Dalton, who died on September 17 aged 87, gave a name to a butt of countless laddish jokes when, in 1953, she identified premenstrual syndrome or PMS, but her views did not win the universal approbation of medical practitioners or feminists.

Katharina Dalton's interest in the issue began when, as a pregnant 32-year-old medical student, she discovered that her own premenstrual migraines disappeared during pregnancy. She concluded that high levels of the hormone progesterone might have made the difference. After further research carried out with the endocrinologist Raymond Greene, she published her theories and coined the term premenstrual syndrome, which she defined as a hormonal illness occurring in the 14 days after ovulation.

Katharina Dalton tested natural progesterone on herself and other women and found it brought rapid relief from headaches and other symptoms and could also be effective in preventing post-natal depression. In addition to her patients, Katharina Dalton studied the wider phenomenon of PMS. She found that teenage girls did less well if they sat exams shortly before or during menstruation and that women were far more likely to attempt suicide, shoplift and commit crimes of violence in the second half of the menstrual cycle. She even concluded that Queen Victoria had suffered from PMS, as indicated by reports of screaming fits and throwing objects at her husband.

Katharina Dalton provided a valuable service in convincing her colleagues in the medical profession that PMS was a real disorder, and in helping many women get the treatment they needed. But her views did not win universal acceptance. Some medical practitioners continued to maintain that menstrual problems have psychological rather than physical causes. Others argued that her cure for PMS - large doses of progesterone - was based on faulty methodology; most experts today use selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors and other medications for the treatment of PMS.

Feminists too had mixed feelings about her findings. Some felt she had exaggerated the problem, lending weight to age-old male prejudices about female irrationality and encouraging the popular myth that women use the excuse of "hormones" to get away with things.

There was some evidence to support the charge. In Once a Month (1978), her best-selling handbook on PMS, Katharina Dalton advised women to plan their lives around this monthly hiatus: "Consult your diary before arranging your next dinner party; avoid those awkward days if you have an interview, an examination or a driving test. If you are a journalist, don't accept a deadline for an article which will clash with the worst time of the month. If you're at work, tell your employer or personnel manager."

Katharina Dalton's views on PMS had dramatic practical implications in the 1980s when several women who had been found guilty of violent crimes, including murder, walked free after appeal court judges accepted her expert testimony that PMS or post-natal depression had substantially impaired their responsibility.

"If women know what's good for them," wrote Margot Lawrence in The Daily Telegraph, "they will repudiate en masse the idea that premenstrual tension (PMT) renders a female less responsible for her actions." She was equally dismissive of Katharina Dalton's advice that women should avoid stress at "the wrong time of the month". "Does she imagine world events and press days wait while female journalists nurse belly aches? . . It would not be long before someone asked 'If a woman isn't fit to take a driving test some days, is she fit to be driving around anyway?' " Of Dutch parentage, she was born Katharina Dorothea Kuipers in London on November 11 1916. As a child she wanted to be a doctor, but, after winning a scholarship to the London Foot Hospital, trained to be a chiropodist.

In 1942, after the death in action of her first husband, Wilfred, she enrolled at the Royal Free Hospital to study Medicine. In 1944, she married Tom Dalton, later a Unitarian minister.

After qualifying, she went into general practice in north London, where she began her studies of PMS. From 1957, she ran her own PMS clinic at University College Hospital - among the first of its kind in the world - and built up a large consulting practice at Wimpole Street.

A kind, motherly figure, Katharina Dalton continued to work until the age of 84 despite suffering from severe arthritis. Her buggy was a familiar sight on the pavements around Harley Street.

Her husband, Tom, died in 1992. She is survived by their son and two daughters, and by a son of her first marriage.